It’s back-to-school season. Knowing your target audience is an essential piece of planning a successful back-to-school marketing campaign. To get the most out of your marketing investment this back-to-school season, it’s important to understand how to identify and segment back-to-school shoppers so you can make sure that the right message reaches the right group at the right time.
In this blog post, we’ll cover how you can segment your target audience to create and deliver custom messaging tailored to individual groups. We’ll discuss segmentation methods that uncover:
- Who they are
- Where they live
- What type of person they are
- How they behave and spend
Here are our tips to accurately define and target your back-to-school marketing audience.
Maximize back-to-school marketing with customer segmentation
Customer segmentation is the process of dividing your audience into smaller groups based on common characteristics such as demographics, behaviors, psychographics, geographics, and more. The purpose of customer segmentation is to create a more personalized and effective approach to marketing. By understanding the unique needs and preferences of each segment, you can tailor your messaging, campaigns, and content to resonate with your customers on a deeper level.
Benefits of customer segmentation
Three benefits of customer segmentation include:
- Improved audience targeting
- Higher engagement rates
- Increased ROI
Instead of addressing your entire customer base with generic messaging, segmentation enables you to deliver custom campaign messaging that speaks directly to each group. This personalized approach helps build trust and loyalty with your customers over time.
Customer segmentation also allows you to better understand your customers, their motivations, and pain points, ultimately leading to more effective marketing campaigns.
Types of customer segmentation
When it comes to segmenting your customers, there are several methods to consider. By experimenting with different approaches, you can find the best fit for your business. Keep in mind that the most effective customer segments will differ depending on the industry.
Let’s review four types of customer segmentation that you can implement as part of your back-to-school marketing strategy.
1. Demographic segmentation
Demographic segmentation categorizes consumers into groups based on shared demographic characteristics such as age, gender, income, occupation, marital status, and family size.
For example, targeting college students during the back-to-school season with promotions on laptops is likely to be more effective than targeting retirees who may have less interest in such products.
2. Behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation divides customers into groups based on their demonstrated behaviors. This method sorts customers by their knowledge of products or services, attitudes toward brands, likes/dislikes about offers, responses to promotions, purchasing tendencies, and usage of products/services.
Behavioral segmentation can help you identify the highest-spending customer segments, so you can budget and target more effectively. Through this type of segmentation, you can analyze each group’s patterns, discover trends, and plan informed marketing moves for the future.
In a back-to-school campaign, you could use behavioral segmentation to identify students who prefer to shop locally. You could then target students who value supporting local businesses and emphasize the importance of buying from local retailers during the back-to-school season.
3. Geographic segmentation
Geographic segmentation involves dividing your target market into groups based on their physical locations. Geographic segmentation reveals aspects of a local market, including physical location, climate, culture, population density, and language.
In a back-to-school campaign, you could use geographic segmentation to identify target audiences in colder climates who may be more interested in winter clothing and gear. You could also use geographic segmentation to target students living in college towns with messaging that speaks directly to campus life.
4. Psychographic segmentation
Psychographic segmentation groups customers based on psychological factors such as lifestyle, interests, personality, and values.
In a back-to-school campaign, you could use psychographic segmentation to target students who value sustainable practices, promote eco-friendly products, or offer incentives for recycling and reusing items.
Watch our 2024 video for tips from industry leaders for back-to-school
In our new Q&A video with Experian experts, we explore changing consumer behaviors surrounding back-to-school shopping in 2024. In the video, we discuss:
- Anticipated shifts in consumer behaviors and shopping habits
- Tactics we predict marketers will employ to navigate signal loss
- Which channels will be the most successful
- And more!
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Marketers Can Now Harness The Tapad Graph In Concert With Twine’s Vetted, Verified TrueData™ Identity Graph. Los Angeles and New York – August 2, 2018 – Tapad, now part of Experian, is reinventing personalization for the modern marketer, today announced that it is partnering with mobile data leader Twine Data to bring Twine’s hundreds of millions of deterministic mobile identity connections to The Tapad Graph. Together, the two companies will create one of the largest portable identity graph & CRM onboarding services in the U.S., through the integration of Tapad’s best in class cross-device capability and Twine’s deterministic identity graph. "Twine is a respected player in the onboarding space", said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. "Through Tapad and Twine’s partnership, our clients can now use their first-party CRM data to leverage the full power of The Tapad Graph — fueling a wide range of data-driven marketing use cases, including audience extension, attribution, and personalization." At the core of one-to-one marketing and true personalization is identity resolution. For marketers, the ability to accurately and safely connect customer activity across desktop/laptop, mobile, CTV, tablets, as well as CRM and offline touchpoints is ultimately what enables informed and personalized future conversations with each customer. Tapad is known for the precision, accuracy, and scale of their cross device connections, setting them up as an ideal partner for Twine’s TrueData deterministic identity graph. “We believe that by combining Tapad’s renowned cross-device connectivity and our deterministic identity graph, marketers will finally be able to seamlessly segment users based on digital and offline behaviors as well as easily distribute those audiences to both DMP and DSP environments for personalized messaging,” said Elliott Easterling, CEO of Twine Data. With this partnership, Tapad will build a client's cross-device graph off of identities onboarded by Twine from a client's offline CRM. The resulting identity graph can either be delivered directly to brands looking to host their own identity graph, or can be leveraged in a managed fashion for marketers looking for simple connectivity of their offline CRM audiences to their DSPs. To date, Twine & Tapad have seen full connectivity rates* for CRM segments from advertisers at between 259 percent and 322 percent at major DSPs. *Full Connectivity Rate is defined as {total unique desktop, laptop, and mobile devices active at DSP} / {unique CRM users in original audience post cleansing}. It represents the final match rate of the clean audience in CRM format to onboarded audience at a client’s DSP instance. This metric encompasses Twine’s onboarding & linkage validation and Tapad’s cross-device amplification. Contact us today About TapadTapad, Inc. is the marketing technology company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer through its identity-driven solutions. The company's signature Tapad Graph connects millions of consumers across billions of devices. The world's largest brands and most effective marketers entrust Tapad to provide an accurate, privacy-conscious and unified approach to connecting with consumers across screens. In 2018, Tapad introduced its Tapad Customer Data Platform (CDP), purpose-built to offer marketers a highly personalized and privacy-safe platform to convert first-, second- and third-party data into actionable, results-driven campaigns. Tapad is based in New York and has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. Tapad's numerous awards include: Forbes' Most Promising Companies, Deloitte's Technology Fast 500, Crain's Fast 50, TMCnet Tech Culture Award and Global Startup Award's "Startup Founder of the Year." Tapad was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Telenor Group is one of the world's largest mobile operators across Scandinavia and Asia. About TwineTwine is a mobile data platform that believes true, honest, accurate data is the fuel that helps our partners grow their businesses efficiently and effectively; Twine’s TrueData is used by brands, agencies, and ad tech partners across the country and across the globe. Twine’s app publisher partners generate revenue while maintaining control over their data; their marketer partners get comprehensive, high quality mobile targeting and intelligence. To learn more about Twine, visit www.twinedata.com.
Marketers Using Centro’s DSP Basis Can Leverage Tapad’s Technology for Extended Cross-device Reach Chicago – May 15, 2018 – Centro, a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising, today announced that its Basis programmatic ad platform has licensed cross-device marketing technology from Tapad, a part of Experian, the company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer. Media professionals using Basis can now drive better performance by identifying a person across the different devices he or she uses, serving ads in the most optimum environment, then analyzing performance to see what ad worked best based on creative, device, location and time of day. Today’s digital media ecosystem is fragmented. People consume content on their multiple devices from multiple locations. According to digital analytics firm GlobalWebIndex, a typical consumer owns three digital devices and has seven digital ID’s active in the last 60 days. 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With the Tapad Graph integrated into Basis, marketers can now identify consumers across all of their devices during any point of the consumer journey. This can help marketers determine ad spend effectiveness for optimizing campaigns in real-time or for the future. Other cross-device marketing capabilities for Basis users include: Frequency Capping: Apply frequency caps at a unique person-level rather than at a device-level to prevent saturating users with ads and showing them more impressions than desired. Audience extension: Expand the reach of a campaign by learning what other devices a single user may have, then deliver ads to single users’ other devices. Reporting insights: Learn how users interact with ads across their devices. Gain insight about how consumers respond on devices to improve targeting parameters. 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